The Most Uncivilized Places

Tonight I saw two generalized and very significant maps of the world that were chillingly similar and also chillingly indicative, because they showed that this country in which so many of us live in borrowed comfort -- in the same sense as "borrowed time" as well as in other respects -- the great United States of America, an alleged "superpower," is actually just as retarded in at least two very important respects as so-called "darkest Africa," or fearsome China or India with their several billions in runaway population. One map appeared in Juan Cole's "Informed Comment" and the other in Andrew Sullivan's "The Dish." The one on Cole's site showed which areas of the world had universal health coverage and which didn't. The one on The Dish showed which countries routinely execute prisoners and which ones find means other than extinguishing something as relatively miraculous on the cosmic scale of things as human lives to punish serious wrong-doers, along with the inevitable numbers of those who are wrongly imprisoned. On these maps the U.S. was the huge, standalone, life-taking gray blob in North America when it came to health care and the identical bloody red blob in North America when it came to legal murders, and in that respect it was keeping dubious company with chunks of Africa and much of Asia along a line east of Europe and south of Siberia, and that means that China was included among those whose governments bump off citizens and don't see to it that all their country's people get an equal shot at getting adequate health care, and thereby in the long run blurring the difference between the essences of capitalism and communism..

Behind maps like these, what else can a person say?